Lost and Found

This morning, 14-year-old Amber Davis is still listed as missing on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Web site; she's classified there as an "endangered runaway" and has been since March 8 of this year. Regarding her circumstances, the site says only that "Amber may still be in the local area," meaning her hometown of Dallas, and that "she has pierced ears." But it says here that during a traffic stop yesterday in Bossier Parish in Louisiana, state troopers realized that one of the passengers in the car they had pulled over was in fact Amber Davis, who, according to officials, left Dallas seven months ago simply because she was "unhappy" and wanted attention.

According to the story, a Louisiana state trooper stopped a 1997 Ford SUV on Interstate 20 east of Bossier City for "improper lane use" and, once he had the vehicle pulled over, he smelled pot--and found a pound of weed and almost two ounces of cocaine. After all six folks in the car were arrested, only then did officers realize during questioning they had the runaway girl. Reports The Shreveport Times:

"Davis, who has been posing as a 19-year-old, spent most of her time reported as a runaway in Dallas, he said. She met the other occupants of the vehicle at a party there Monday. The group was passing through on the way to a court appearance.

'She has been ready to go back home,' said Doug Pierrelee, spokesman for the Bossier City-based troop. 'She told us she called once and didn't get an answer. Other times, she was too scared to tell her mom who it was -- she would just listen and then hang up.'"

Davis was reunited yesterday with her mother, near the Texas-Louisiana border, and she won't be charged. As of this morning, she was still listed on the NCMEC's Web site.

According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Web site, Davis was one of 46 children from Texas listed as having run away from home within the last year; they're all female, and 10 of them come from the North Texas area. If you expand the search for kids who've gone missing in the last five years, the number nearly doubles to 80, and if you ask for records of kids who've gone missing in the last decade from Texas, the number increases to 95. Listed among the missing is Baraah Ahmad Jridi, who was kidnapped from Garland by her father when she was 4, in 1997, and likely taken to Jordan; and Rachel Hannahruth White, who was 2 in 2003, when she was abducted by her non-custodial mother. In fact, many (most, actually) of the Texans listed on the site are females who appear to have been taken by a parent who didn't have legal custody. --Robert Wilonsky